Indeed!!

Fair point but I meant something more specific. Let

David,
I said something very similar in my member intro but going from this to rejecting the products of 20th C art is throwing the baby out with the bath water, don

From the 15th-19th centuries perhaps but for several thousands of years before and for the last 130 years no.

You know for me, I cannot pass a painting by Bouguereau without stopping dead in my tracks and devouring it with my eyes. I can look at his paintings for hours on end. :)

The Denver Art Museum has a Bouguereau, and it is the most popular painting in the gallery. Like me, people just stop and gape at it it is so beautiful.

And isn't that saying something? Isn't beauty an end in itself?

Why the heck does art have to be "relevant"?

No! Said with such certainty. Have you polled every living artist working today? I guess early 20th Century artists such as William McGregor Paxton, Edmund Tarbell, Joseph Rodefer DeCamp, Pietro Annigoni, and John Koch didn't really exist. You continue to make ridiculous broad sweeping assumptions, parroting the old party line. If you repeat it enough will it actually come true?

I do accept the fact that the moderns and post moderns existed with their own set of goals. I don't dismiss the fact that the works they created have some marginal merit, but to me, they are akin to assignments I had done in my color and design class and I don't take them too seriously. As far as finding great and fulfilling masterpieces, I think not.

Again, I state all my conclusions as mine alone and they are truths for just me. I wouldn't be so naive to think that by blasting my point of view, just for the sake of blasting it, it becomes the ultimate truth for everyone. And If my thinking goes against the common accepted contemporary 'truths' regarding what and what isn't great ART, so much the better. Ugly, muddy, grotesque, heavy handed, simplistic, shocking, confrontational, conceptual, repetitious and formulaic pap just don't float my boat.

I certainly cannot deny you the right to find a B beautiful. Personally I cannot imagine having a B hanging in my home whereas I don't have enough wall space for Cezanne, Giacometti or Klimt. - personal taste.

As for whether beauty is enough or even necessary for it be Art with a capital A - it is a complicated relationship. Definitions of beauty vary to a preposterous degree but also much great art self evidently does not pursue beauty. I think beauty can be a sufficient objective for art but for Art I am not so sure.

As for should Art be relevant - when has what we identify as great Art not been? Art has always been about transmitting messages and there is no point in transmitting an irrelevant message. The argument therefore turns on whether a particular message at a particular time and place is relevant or not. I would argue that compared to the messages being transmitted by Corot, Daumier, Courbet, Millet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Cezanne the message of B was irrelevant. Time and place i.e. context and the living world rather than formula and convention.

Never heard of them Marvin and I have studied art history - I presume they are minor artists who might have a local influence but hardly world shakers.

We all have our gods and their influence is seen perhaps in our work and values artistically and that is the beauty of this place. I am challenged by you Marvin and by Thomasin and Ilaria just to mention three and how more stimulating or different can you get.

So I will encourage us to keep this as a "thoughtful" discussion rather than taking each other to task or making personal snips. :)

That said, Peter, I don't see much "message or content" in the work of Monet, rather I see a lot of beauty, and a lot of classically trained skill. His work shows an artist who knows what rules to break (complementary analogous color) in order to make water lillies appear to float off the canvas at 9 feet...but message? Not much that I can discern. Much of his work is a classic example of art for the sake of beauty. I see Bouguereau the same way - he just had more fantastical visions and was inspired by allegory and fable rather than what he saw in the real world. Now mind you, Bouguereau certainly used the real world to create his visions, as did Monet, just in different ways...but for similar ends - beauty.

Are there any elements in B that had not been done countless times before? Monet on the other hand had many new things to say about colour in the world and the beauty in the seemingly insignificant haystack or lilly pond. Don't you look at lilly ponds and haystacks in a different way after Monet? Can you really say the same after B?

After seeing a B painting, I certainly look at my own work in a different way: it sucks!

So this piece is called Laocoon and his Sons. It was likely sculpted before 100BC. It was unearthed around the time of Michelangelo's birth and toured around europe - it is likely that Michelangelo and many of the artists of his time saw this sculpture which was regarded to be the pinnacle of artistic endeavor...1,500 years before...

Now imagine if someone had taken Michelangelo to this sculpture and said to him,

"This has been done before. Perfection has already been achieved and you might as well not even try to tread this old ground again."

Can you imagine our world without the Pieta? Without the David?

Perfection in stone had already been achieved 1500 years before Michelangelo was even born...

I think you are painting with too broad a brush here Peter. There is merit in many artistic paths, and each path has its own challenges and rewards. Granted, each will speak to different people as they view the works from those artists. :)

This argument fascinates...

My favorite painting (at the moment) has terrible technique and is loaded with idyllic fantasy and sentiment. I love it anyway! Chagall's Promenade.

Hope you all wrap this argument up soon, because it interests me and I keep checking my computer. And I've really got work to do!!

Later,
Christy

Michelangelo was an artist of the renaissance during which artists were breaking from the conventions imposed by the Catholic Church and rediscovering the naturalism of the Greeks and Romans not only in the visual arts but following the capture of Islamic libraries in Cordoba and Seville of Philosophy and theatre. It was new to them after centuries of conformity and limitations regarding how the human figure could be portrayed following the disaster of the Iconoclasts. B lived several unbroken centuries after Michelangelo and chose to build nothing new and that was precisely the point that artists from Courbet to Monet were making.

Have you visited the Opera House in Paris?

You know, and it is wonderful that a group of artists were able to make the leap to impressionism and succeed at it. But just because Beaugereau did not hear that particular call in -his- art does not make his work unworthy of appreciation, and certainly does not warrant dismissal, IMO.

I for one see in his work, a focused lens of perspective that I think no painter in history had before him. It is expressed not only in his facility for creating incredible visual illusion that stops you dead in your tracks, but also in his ability to create freshness in allegory, fable, and the fantastic. :)

Now as a portrait painter I look at Bouguereau with a self-interested eye seeing what I can learn as I do at many artists. I will not have him on my walls but I have no shame in seeing how he painted flesh just as I look at Klimt, Lucien Freud and others - for the rest we will have to agree to differ.

You presume? Quite the compelling argument! Peter do you actually believe that having never heard of something is reasonable cause for assuming it's insignificance? How could any artist, unknown to you, be any good, let alone great? I have no response.

I think this discussion has gotten to the point of pointlessness. Christy, you can now go back to work.

Peter,

Healthy discussions and debate about art are more than acceptable. That you have decided that your opinion of any of our members' work - in this case, Marvin's- has a place in this discussion is clearly misplaced.

Since you have been reading the forum posts for two years, it should be pretty clear that if Marvin, or any of our other members, wanted to hear opinions about their work, they'd have posted in the critiques section. Even in that venue, critiques are expected to offer constructive, helpful input, not relate to personal tastes of the viewer.

And I agree, this thread has reached a point of pointlessness.

Surely you understand the notion of ad hominem argument.

Have I entered the twilight zone? I understand the term ad hominim all too well but how is it relevant here since I have only praised Marvin's work which I like very much? I am genuinely confused.

The Boston School is marginal outside of the US Marvin as I think you know. As a point of fact it was contemporary more less with groups who in my opinion were doing far more interesting work including the Vienna Secession. That does not mean that they do not merit interest since they were virtually the only inheritors of the French Academy style but most artists did not reject modernism in the way that they did.

In terms of my own country I find the work of the Euston Road school, Victor Pasmore, Coldstream and Rogers more stimulating. Different traditions and matters of Taste I know Marvin but what is a guy to do?

As far as allegory goes would anyone care to argue that B is more profound or pictorially interesting than Klimt? I would be very happy to compare selected works of B with the University murals or the Beethovan Freize.

Peter,

Here are the comments to which Chris is referring:

and

You most definitely haven't "only praised Marvin's work." It's not a question even of whether or not Marvin minds. These comments reflect a value judgement of his work relevant to your personal taste, which is not acceptable on this forum.

I am quite clearly commenting on a style exemplified by B and by Marvin himself ( a style I described as stunning since it is B's allegorical painting content I have targeted here and not the portraits) and saying that I do not feel an imperative to adopt that style. I have also said on this thread that Marvin's work as that of several others is a challenge to me pulling me in different directions. Tight is not a perjorative nor did I attempt to use it as such but merely one side of a continuum along which we are all situated according to our own aesthetics and so there is no ad hom being made. Furthermore I would not consider it appropriate to comment on a style in the Critiques section - only on the technical merit of the work within whatever style the artist was using. What on earth would people here say if I actually said BOO?

I don't understand why there is this desire to compare styles of art. It's very simply, subjective. The art speaks for itself, don't you think?

The point where things break down for me and become beneath pointlessness is when one observer says, "I like this," and the rebuttal is "No you don't" (or some passive-aggressive version of, "Then you're a brigand or a fool, or both.") That's not an art critic at work, it's a Psych 101 case study.

There isn't a single artist mentioned in this thread about whom I can't say that I admire some of his work and don't care much for other parts of it. The historical bookmark is instructive but doesn't add or detract from the aesthetic impression that a piece of artwork makes on me.

Except Renoir. Don't get it. Don't like any of it. (Please -- if anyone is thinking about responding, "Yes you do," don't.)

Amen to that! :)

I'll disappoint you though... I first saw Renoir in the museum as a young child, and he was probably my favorite at that time. Of course having had no art appreciation classes, I have to admit I also quite liked Holly Hobbie and singing Farmer in the Dell! :P

I used to have problems with Renoir as well being primarily a 'line' artist - in fact Renoir had problems with himself periodically hardening up edges and drawing but his best work is where drawing remains fluid and edges become lost. The translucent, succulent quality he gets painting (female) flesh is mesmerising. Not at the top of my personal pantheon but in the top league.

Yes art does speak for itself but then we discuss whether what it says appeals and/or says something shallow or deep. Culture is always reflecting on what it is saying from the theatre to music to the visual arts and it is the push and pull of comparison and discussion that moves us in one direction or another. Individuals come along who appear to have more to say than others or who encapsulate moods and aspirations in society. Of course commercialism distorts and even directs this process from time to time but quality usually although not always wins out. Society does not stay still and neither do we.